Now the same principle is being applied to stymie the emergency of another set of companies in the transportation sector — cloud-driven ride-sharing services.

Ridesharing — also known as carpooling — involves members of the public contacting each other via a smartphone or PC internet networking service and arranging to ferry each other to various destinations for fees. The practice in informal form is almost as old as the automobile itself, but in the digital age app-enabled ridesharing has seen an explosion in interest, threatening the commercial taxicab industry and the city officials who depend on that industry for revenue.